Apple TV+’s kaleidoscopic urban blight drama City on Fire comes to a close this week with events both explosive and not so much.
Amory’s on the move, William’s holding on for dear life, Regan and Keith are missing a few kids, Nicky and Sol come to blows, Charlie and Lorraine tell the truth, Parsa gets a second chance, and Samantha’s in the dark — just like New York City itself.
The limited series finale, entitled “In the Dark,” brings a suitably emotional ending to a show that narrowly avoided greatness.
City on Fire recap: ‘In the Dark’
Season 1, episode 8: Charlie (played by Wyatt Oleff) just did something suicidally heroic. After helping Detective Parsa (Omid Abtahi) track an anarchist collective’s bomb to a financial district building, he leaped onto a window-washing platform on the 39th floor and diffused the explosive.
He got a little help from one of the bombing’s planners, Lorraine (Alexandra Doke), who wanted to die when she found out what her crew — rock stars D.T. (Dylan T Jackson), Nicky (Max Milner) and Sol (Alexander Pineiro) — had cooked up. They’re planning their getaway now, as is their one-time benefactor, Amory Gould (John Cameron Mitchell), who was the target of the bombing.
Before Amory tried to skip town (he didn’t get very far because his driver was killed in a car accident about 10 seconds after they left after a citywide blackout knocked out the traffic lights), he stabbed his nephew William (Nico Tortorella), who was trying to keep him in town. William, his father Bill Sr. (Geoff Pierson), his sister Regan (Jemima Kirke) and his boyfriend Mercer (Xavier Clyde) brought a ton of evidence of Amory’s guilt in a conspiracy to defraud Bill Sr.’s company to Parsa and his partner detective McFadden (Kathleen Munroe).
A blackout puts NYC on edge
Just when it looked like they would arrest him and finally hold his feet to the fire for his arson-spiked real-estate scheme, Amory’s bodyguard stabbed Will, which created a distraction during which Amory fled. The question is, can he actually make it to freedom with the city in lights-out lockdown?
The blackout has made things very dodgy for Samantha (Chase Sui Wonders), the girl who was shot in the head and sparked this City on Fire’s central mystery. She’s in a coma in the hospital. And with the power out in her room, nurses are keeping her alive by pumping oxygen into her mouth manually. Her dad (Michael Tow) realizes he has to get to the hospital from his house (many boroughs away) as quickly as possible or he might miss her last minutes.
With the bomb defused, D.T., Nicky and Sol start squabbling immediately. Nicky kicks Sol out of their getaway van, then tries to shoot him.
It’s confession time
Lorraine comes clean about Sam’s attempted murder, as she was there when it happened. Sol did it, on Nicky’s orders. Sam felt bad when one of their Amory-funded arson raids caused someone’s death, and tried to take communal money to give it to the dead guy’s family. Nicky knew that was the last straw, and had Sol shoot her in Central Park.
Lorraine started talking about how she was jealous of the relationship Nicky had with Sam. And Sol, getting jealous himself, made Lorraine shoot Sam. However, she missed the first time, so Sol shot her the second time. Parsa isn’t sure if that gets either of them any jail time, but he’s fine letting them just kinda hang nearby until he figures it all out.
Lorraine is drained. She hasn’t been this honest with herself (or anyone else) in a long, long time. Charlie runs into his mom (Shawnee Smith), who drove into town despite the blackout to look for him. And Parsa finally releases Charlie from his custody.
Regan and her husband, Keith (Ashley Zukerman), take the blackout news as badly as everyone else. Their kids leave their day camp early, so Regan and Keith don’t know where they are for hours. Eventually, it becomes clear that they left school, got on the train and walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to their other apartment. When they call and let their parents know they’re fine, Keith and Regan are so relieved they have sex for the first time since last year. (I’m not sure I buy this, but whatever. Regan spent the last seven episodes threatening to withhold piss if Keith was on fire. So her being psyched to take him back, even in the heat of the moment, doesn’t really track.)
I am still holding you tightly
McFadden makes it to Regan’s apartment hoping to arrest Amory, but only finds William dying of his stab wound. Bill, Mercer and McFadden dummy up a stretcher and carry him to the hospital. At that same hospital, Samantha is barely holding on for dear life. The last few episodes of City on Fire portrayed Sam’s coma as if she’s stuck in her favorite rock club, which is a go-nowhere device to ensure Chase Sui Wonders gets more to do than lie in bed. But I did kind of like the idea that the person who comes to her in her coma fantasy to ask if she wants to live or die is William, her favorite rock star.
Parsa takes Lorraine to the police station and gets a call from his wife; their efforts to have a child have failed yet again, so he makes lemons from lemonade and asks Lorraine to come back to stay with him and his wife. Happy endings all around.
And finally, Sam comes out of her coma
Then Charlie goes back to the hospital, now that he’s no longer a wanted man, and finds Sam awake.
“You look different,” she says.
“I am,” he replies.
It’s pretty cheesy, but the moment works. The show though? I don’t know. I’ll have to see if I give City on Fire a second thought in about six months.
Right now, this feels like a very lightweight treatment of a couple of heavy subjects. I was consistently engaged as the show went on, but I can’t help but look back and see all the missed opportunities to do something with a little more heft.
There’s murder and drugs and sex and infidelity and crime and fire and violence and yet … City on Fire still feels like nothing more than just another TV show.
★★★☆☆
Watch City on Fire on Apple TV+
New episodes of City on Fire arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
